My last post on boating during the Edwardian era and the book “Comfort in a Small Craft” prompted John Hopthrow to get in contact with me regarding one of the adverts I posted from that book.
The toilet on the Wherry Dragon 1955
John’s family owned the pleasure wherry Dragon during the 1950s and he has contributed greatly to the Broadland Memories website in the past with extracts from her original sailing logs and photographs of Dragon. The advert for the yacht sanitary fittings produced by John Downton and Co. included examples of three of the toilets they manufactured for marine use and John spotted one of those which looked very much like the toilet which was on Dragon. He sent me the photograph on the left from 1955 which does indeed look very similar to the “Solent” loo in that ad. It looks quite an ornate affair which I suppose was only to be expected on such a luxurious pleasure wherry. I’m sure that the history of the development of boating bogs must be quite interesting, in fact when we visited the Museum of the Broads last year there seemed to be plans to create a display of marine toilets over the years which I will have to pop back to have a look at!
Interior of the motor cruiser Patricia c1963
I’ve uploaded some new additions to the main website this morning which include the photograph on the right which is an interior shot of the motor cruiser Patricia which was hired from Collins Pleasure Craft Ltd. of Oulton Broad c1963. Looking forward from the saloon, the photograph shows one of the two toilets which were fitted on Patricia, this particular model being in the bow. Interior shots like this seem to be quite rare other than those which were shot for promotional use for the boating brochures of the time …… look at all that lovely mahogany! The photograph comes from another set of images from the collection of Andrew Day which feature several holidays taken by an unknown family on the Broads between 1962 and 1968. Also uploaded today were a small set of photos from the Aylott family which were taken during a holiday on board Royal Oak in 1961 and some lovely memories from Brian Kermode of his first Broadland holiday c1960.
It’s the first proper test to make sure everything is now working as it should be with regard to the website on my rebuilt PC and seems to have been successful! The next job on my list is to remaster and add two sets of photographs from the 1970s to the website which I can hopefully start on next week.
